This is my first post too, and I'm already coming close to breaking rule 8 but it's worth a shot.
I've been reading and playing by this thread since page 40, and it has helped me become a leader in many guilds, a respected player, and a serious dps slot. Zurm Flyingtoaster Trakor Redcape Avitus to only begin, you guys do so much for this thread and in my opinion so much for ret pallies on all servers...

My message, chill, you can all work together and get something great going. It's not a race to figure out our to be cycle or priority, and I'm sure that you guys will nail it in the end. Till then keep doing what your doing, work off each other, and thanks from all the readers.

So Art of War is working properly now and it's additive with Righteous Vengeance. They are both multipliers of the crit bonus, not the entire crit damage. Also, Crusade increases your crit bonus, stacking multiplicatively with AoW and RV. It increases your crit bonus by twice the amount indicated by the tooltip. For Humanoids, Demons, Undead, and Elementals it increases the crit bonus by 12%, everything else by 6%. So not only does it already increase your crit bonus simply by virtue of increasing your base damage, but it further increases your crit bonus by twice its value again.

To calculate your crit:
Crit = (Base + (Base * (Crusade * 2) * (AoW + RV)))

Base already inlcudes Crusade, Improved Ret Aura, and Vengeance. This means with Crusade, AoW, and RV fully talented a Judgement or Divine Storm crit against Humanoids, Demons, Undead, and Elementals will hit for 262.4% of the base damage.

Improved Retribution Aura and Vengeance increase your total damage by a flat amount. No triple dipping.

It's not that simple. Besides the issue you mentioned, it still has to do a lot with human reaction times and lag. Not as much as 500ms for most of us, but 100-200ms still factor in quiet a bit. 9 seconds become 9.1-9.5 seconds, your "perfectly matched sequence" starts having some clashes it wouldn't have without the added milliseconds, losing some of its advertised benefits by "lining up better".

As you mapped it out:

Strict FCFS, priority rotation, normal cooldowns, HoW is on top of prioritizing Judgements.
Strict FCFS, priority rotation 7 cd set bonus cd, HoW is on top of prioritizing Judgements.

This is all that matters.

So, general case scenario prioritizing HoW is the way to go. "Special case" 9 second Judgements is... a very special case where things "might" line up better (it's "luck" that they line up that well with cooldowns rather than logic) and if you follow my reasoning, this is really not something you will be able to always guarantee normally, meaning you lose any perceived advantage.

Why do people prioritize CS over Judgement at all? CS is physical (reduced by armor), has no secondary utility at all, and does not get the extreme crit multipliers that Judgement does. Seems to me that CS is becoming less and less important especially as target armor increases.

I think the reason is that even though CS is low DPC(damage per cast), it's high DPS due to its quick refresh rate. However, I think that thinkign is confused by the thought that if you push it back at all, it is constantly pushed back, which is simply not true. The chaotic nature of our wotlk attack system is that everything gets pushed back a bit here and there, but nothing conflicts to such a degree that it gets pushed back every cooldown. Exceptions are sub 35% with the AW glyph active on an undead boss, where you literally cannot use your abilities fast enough. UD bosses in general tend to crunch your CDs, but a basic priority system preferring the highest damage attack will resolve that without causing any ability to be completely neglected. You might only Exorcise or Consecrate every 18ish or 10ish seconds, but your bread and butter abilities will flow together nicely enough.

Libram of Fortitude - Wowhead Search
Notice how the new librams at 80 give you attack power when you use Crusader Strike? Opening with it would apply that attack power to your other abilities which, in my opinion, can only be a good thing.

Also, why do people prioritise highest damage abilites first? Shouldn't the collision resolution "protocol" be to use whichever ability prevents collision for the most amount of time?

Finally, and I know this may not be the case for you, but if I cast Judgment then CS I find they will collide on the very next round of attacks due to my higher latency. But naturally your results will probably differ.

Has anybody done any research or thought about paladin scaling with the current itemization? Only stats we can stack ad infinitum are str (or AP) and crit (or agi).

My napkin math (single-target) shows that both haste and armor penetration affect roughly 1/3 or our damage. Haste affects auto attack and seals procced by auto attacks (about half or our seal damage, assuming SoB), while ArP affects auto attacks and crusader strike.

I made a search of current dps plate items and I see far too much ArP and haste to my liking. At certain gear level (quite soon actually) you are already Hit and Expertise capped so you don't have much choice while taking your gear - you will be taking haste and ArP gear even if it's not optimal.

Compared to DKs and Warriors, are we going to lag behind because of the current itemization?

Maybe. We actually get vastly superior returns on Str compared to the other plate users, so it seems likely to me that even if we end up using crappy ArPen and haste on gear we should scale just fine. Frost and Unholy DKs actually don't want ArPen either, it is pretty godawful for them, and I don't think that haste is actually all that much better for Warriors or DKs than us. Both of them do more than half of their damage from strikes as I understand it, so they aren't significantly better off than we are.

We get a higher return on agility than a warrior does, but they get a vastly higher return on ArPen. I think as long as we wear tier pieces when possible (since our sets shouldn't have ArPen on them) and avoid ArPen when we can we should end up scaling just as well as other platewearers. Our Str scaling might even be so outrageous that we just eclipse them at high gear levels, but that remains to be seen.

A Dual-wielding DK does less than a third of his damage as white damage. Even worse if he's not 18 deep in unholy. It's around 25% for the standard 2h build. They still put haste on T7 >.<

Could someone explain how a macro such as...

/cast Judgement
/castsequence reset=8 Seal of Blood, Judgement
/startattack

should be used?

Ive never used macros with the "reset" thing so I'm not sure if it should be spammed...used once every 8 seconds or whatnot.

Or if you have a better macro, feel free to post it with how you have used it in the past.

Manual mapping revealing where random clashes happen ("luck"). This is the remaining unknown once "logic" is established. It's not supposed to make sense, but it's true nevertheless.

Use this:

/startattack
/castsequence reset=30 Seal of Blood, Judgement

"Reset=30" resets the sequence to start from the beginning every 30 seconds (to avoid resealing and losing mana when you have a seal up).

Anyway, in less than a week it won't matter as you won't need a Judgement+Re-Seal macro anymore (Seals will last 2 mins, Judgements won't consume Seals).

As to the first part, the answer is pretty obvious when you look at the rotation. When you prioritize Judgement on a 7 second cooldown, you will ALWAYS be pushing back HoW by a second, due to Judgement coming off cooldown first (7 seconds, versus the 7.5 of HoW + first GCD). As for the second part, I actually found a spot in one of my 9-second Judgement rotations where I had goofed the priorities (blame a whole lot of zombie copy-and-pasting for that) and I'm re-working the rotation now, after which I'll try to get it saved as a friendlier format. 97-03 doesn't work, because the spreadsheet has too many rows, but I'll see if I can get an OpenOffice format.

EDIT: Ok, with the fixed rotation, the two 9-second FCFS rotations come to exactly the same totals, 395,385.28 damage, which puts the fixed HoW-Judgement system handily out in front at 402620.72 damage. No luck on converting the spreadsheet, only other option I can think of it screenshotting and stitching it together, but it'd be a rather large picture.

Cast Priorities:

I've been listening in for a while to the whole "higher damage ability first" (Redcape) vs "higher DPS ability first" (multiple others) discussion without weighing in on either side (besides the HoW vs. Judgement argument <35%).

I've went back and did some crunching and I have to say it's pretty clear to me that higher DPS ability first is the correct priority system and here's why:


First, I'll establish some common agreed upon facts:

-FCFS is the system of choice: There is no discernible easy/short repeating pattern of ability use to create a traditional "rotation" on, therefore FCFS (first come first served) is the way to go.

Note: It seems some people have trouble grasping this: FCFS means you will always hit the first ability out of cooldown regardless of priority. Priority of an ability over another will be used if and only if two abilities come out of cooldown at the same time (or within milliseconds, some personal judgement should be used of course).

-A priority system to resolve cooldown/GCD clashes is needed: This leaves us with having to create a "priority" system on a case-by-case basis with the following three constraints (in order of importance):

1. The main issue: Overall DPS gain/loss of delaying one ability over the other.
2. DPS gain/loss due to some "partial lucky patterns" creating more/less clashes in the future.
3. Theoretical DPS gain/loss due to lower cd abilities being spammed more/less.


For No. 2:

"DPS gain/loss due to some "partial lucky patterns" creating more/less clashes in the future."

I'm not going to discuss this one in depth as the only way to know for sure is to map it out manually on a very lengthy sheet (10 minute fight). I will say however that ultimately with the "flowing nature" of FCFS (in contrast to a strict rotation system), lag and human error, most perceived "advantages" in avoiding an occasional clash visible on a spreadsheet by using some custom "invented" priority sequence will not be perfectly replicated in practice. It's more of a luck thing than something you should build your priorities around.


For No. 1:

"The main issue: Overall DPS gain/loss of delaying one ability over the other."

This is the main/most DPS significant issue here and the one we can handle with "logic". How much DPS do you actually lose by using ability X over Y when both are out of cooldown? Highest damage, shortest cooldown or highest DPS?

Figuring this out wasn't too hard. For consistency (as a "case study"), I'm using the numbers supplied by Redcape for "damage per cast". Assuming they are correct this was the result:



Spreadsheet is also linked here for those interested. It's fairly simple, but you can change the damage per cast numbers/add some delay to cooldowns for lag and see how it changes.

How to read the sheet:

Vertically listed abilities on the left are always cast before horizontal abilities listed at the top.

For example you can compare:

-DS(+SoB) damage per cast: 5128.47 damage
-CS(+SoB) damage per cast: 4014.63 damage
-Using CS and delaying DS by 1 GCD will net you: 1115 DPS
-Using DS over CS will net you: 1048.1 DPS
-> You're losing around 66.9 instantaneous DPS if you use a "higher damage per cast" priority!

Obviously in FCFS you won't get the same clashes all the time, but every time you make the wrong priority choice you will lose some damage by delaying a higher DPS ability which will make a noticable dent in your overall average DPS and total damage done at the end of the fight.

Note: A more extreme example of DS > HoW for instance would create a loss of 116 instantaneous DPS.


For No. 3:

"Theoretical DPS gain/loss due to lower cd abilities being spammed more/less." this is the only remaining argument that people can come up with for a "higher damage per cast" priority and I have to say it's incredibly weak.

Through practical testing even while spamming CS (6 second cd) over DS (10 sec cd) I almost never get more than one clash at the same time (which would delay multiple abilities), it's a "freak accident" at best when it happens and usually only rarely occurs when Exorcism is being used.

At the same time, there's still occasional gaps in GCD activity meaning: While spamming shorter cd abilities might theoretically create a fraction more GCD clashes over a long fight, we still have a lot of leeway and quite a bit of it is left down to "luck" and how cooldowns shake out. It is by far not the case that spamming a few buttons more frequently (for a notable DPS increase as by "point no. 1") will jam our abilities completely to create constant delays on everything else.

Also it's important to state this clearly: The losses by going against "point no.1" (delaying higher DPS abilities) are massive compared to any minute gains that are hoped for by potentially having an additional clash somewhere.


Conclusion:

Having laid out all elements of this argument, I'm very sure a "higher DPS ability" priority system is the way to go:

Strict higher DPS priority would be: HoW > JoB > CS > Cons > DS (as compared to a
strict higher damage priority would be: JoB > HoW > DS > Cons > CS)

Keep in mind it's probably best to use DS over Consecration nevertheless, since they are fairly close.

I really would have liked to avoid such a lengthy dissection, but we've been having so much going back and forth, I hope this lays the issue to rest. If someone is going to counter argue, please use the points established.

A good test to run to get rid of the finickyness: do the standard simulation, but use randomized remaining cds on the abilities from the start. Do this a bunch of times, average results.

This type of simulation is really way more realistic - it does away with coincidental gains which will vanish if you have to spend a gcd on a health pot, and averages away some of the random error on the end that we get because cutting it off right before a DS makes a big difference from cutting it off right after.

Other possibly useful alterations are to add .1s of player latency, to toss in 'other' gcds to represent where we had to take care of something else, or to reset all the non-ranged cds every once in a while to simulate the 'had to stop dpsing for a second to do something for the encounter' event.

Before the reset macros came around, The old macro was just

#showtooltip Judgement
/cast Judgement
/cast Seal of Blood

and it's still the one I use, but I've modified it a bit.

#showtooltip Judgement
/console Sound_EnableSFX 0
/cast Judgement
/cast Seal of Blood
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear()
/console Sound_EnableSFX 1

These 3 lines simply get rid of the on screen error message and voice emote when using the macro at the start of a fight. You still can't spam the button, and you would have to hit it twice if you GCD was down while you judged but it's what I use, and I hope it helps you with future macros as this one, yes, will be obsolete in about 5 days woot

I think I ended up really confusing the issue. I went back and looked at my posts and the posts around them and I think we were arguing at cross purposes. I was mostly arguing just about sub 35% rotations, but I think due to me being unclear in some places I ended up making a mess of the argument because we were debating both regular rotations and sub 35% rotations at various points. To summarize my opinions:

When you are above 35% and have Consecrate, Judgement, CS, DS available you should use FCFS and hit the highest DPS ability first.. This is because you have plenty of GCDs and you want to maximize dps. It would look like:

CS
Judgement
DS
Cons

I really thought that below 35% you would be better off hitting Judgement first, but I think I have to admit I made a mistake. My initial sub 35 rotation prioritizing HoW clocked in at just below the one prioritizing Judgement, but I went back and redid my work and I corrected an error I made in the rotation, and lo and behold the HoW came out ahead. As such, you should just park HoW at the top of the chart to get the best sub 35 rotation.

HoW
CS
Judgement
DS
Cons

Curses! I do hate being wrong!

->This<- is the sheet I used to do the calculations. The HoW priority rotation is about .9% ahead in dps, so it isn't like the difference is critical. As a note, you can even fit a Exorcism into the rotation every 25 seconds or so to push things a little higher if you have a vulnerable boss.

Edit: Avitus, in your sheet you used my number for Consecrate damage but on a 8 second cooldown. My number was assuming the glyph was used for a 10 second cooldown.

So... I know this was all done in order to avoid any confusions, but the priorities you two are writing are completely different. Any idea what went wrong?

It seems one person is looking at the CS libram (gives AP when you use CS) and the other is not.

Can someone with a beta key make and constantly bump (so it stays on first page) a thread about us needing 45 yards auras baseline as other classes have? On the WotLK beta forums, of course. I do that on European forums, but I doubt it has much effect. It has to be on the beta forums where GhostCrawler lurks.

It's a very important issue now that auras affect all raid, and the 30 yards for Retribution Aura is way low and makes to sense compared to the range of the rest of raid buffs from other classes (including auras, which all have 45 yards range). Probably there will be bosses where only half the raid or less will get our damage and haste bonuses.

We really need to get an answer on this and get it solved until patch or until the expansion at the latest.

A question regarding the Seal being used is that is this discussion purely theory based? What I mean is that while it has been established that SoB is the best DPS out of all seals, is the damage done to yourself an actual consideration for practical use in raid situations? Will the damage you do offset 'smart heals' of other classes putting the tank in danger? Should DS be considered of higher priority over CS for this reason?

I created yet another thread about this over on the pally forums. Some people talk about it, but most of them dont seem to care, so its hard to keep it in the 1st page though.

Since the healing effects of Judgement of Light scale with attack power, those heals easily mitigate the seal damage to yourself. As far as judgement damage goes, there may be some spikes with crits, but at 70 anyway its still not very much relatively. On ptr, my judgement crits for ~3200ish which means ~1050 damage to myself. That's not very much that hot's, coh's, or chain heal's can't take care of from the raid healers anyway. Also don't forget about the healing effect from Divine Storm helping out to mitigate.

Not sure if there are any bugs with JoL right now, but on ptr on the test dummies, when I'm using JoL instead of JoW, JoL/Divine Storm heals are easily keeping my health topped off even from any SoB judgement crits.